Data centers typically host a wide variety of information systems that run or support a company's business. Today's business environment is complex and correspondingly the information systems that run or support the business are complex with various levels of functional and technical interdependencies. For example, Human Resources and Financial systems include various functional components (Human Resources—Payroll, Time & Labor, Core HR, Benefits, etc.; Financials—General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Billing, etc.) with numerous interactions between these components. As one illustration of such an interaction, the Human Resources Payroll component that supports a company's payroll has a critical interface with the Financial General Ledger component—in order to ensure that every paycheck paid to employees by the HR department is properly accounted for by the company's Finance and Accounting department. Also, these information systems include both logical technical components such as web servers, application servers, and database servers, as well as physical technical components such as server hardware (e.g., CPU, memory), network hardware, storage hardware, etc. The physical technical components occupy real estate in a data center and are themselves dependent on a variety of other infrastructure components such as the data center power, cooling, cabling, cabinet and floor layout.
In addition, the information systems and their dependencies as mentioned above are always in a state of change—due to business drivers (mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, growth, regulations, change in business model, etc.) as well as technology drivers (new technologies, upgrades, enhancements, replacements, consolidation, software development life cycle, support lifecycle, etc). Large organizations use tools such as CMDB (configuration management database) and change management processes to control their IT environments. However, there is no single tool that is able to assess the complete set of dependencies and consequently determine impact to business of a data center migration of a given set of applications, servers or other components from one configuration to another. Due to the critical importance of information systems in today's world, any interruption to the information systems translates into an interruption of the company's business.
Conventional approaches fail to minimize the business risk during a data center migration. Such approaches instead generally focus on specific components (e.g., a set of applications or servers being migrated) without qualifying and quantifying the overall impact to a client's IT environment. Also, these conventional approaches do not readily scale, and thus the level of effort needed becomes prohibitive for large data center migration projects (e.g., over 500 applications or 1000 servers). The conventional approaches are therefore unduly complicated, time-consuming and costly when used for such projects. Similar problems arise in contexts not involving a full migration but instead involving a different type of transformation or other transition of a data center.